Description
You had best only be a visitor at the Brig, because this is where criminals do hard time. The guards are greedy, and bribery can be used for several purposes: get yourself or a friend released early, or pay to increase the duration of time your enemies spend locked up! The Brig is where you are sent after you commit a crime, such as making false security reports or starting a bar fight. Why anyone would want to do that, you say? Well sometimes, in order to get things done and climb their career ladder, one must commit a crime or might have to do something the station's authorities see as a crime. In a post-apocalyptic world, nearly everyone with the will to survive can find themselves in conflict with the authorities once in a while. Depending on multiple factors, you will have to stay a certain amount of time in the Brig to serve your sentence. Those factors are: the gravity of your crime, the Law level, and the Orwellian level of the station. So do your best to not get caught!
Welcome Text
When Brig is empty:
- Be vigilant, Citizen! Report all crime and help keep this area relevant!
- The brig is currently empty, Citizen. Behave yourself, lest that quickly change!
- There are no visitation rights, when there is nobody to visit! I have my eye on you, Citizen!
When Brig is not empty:
- There are a number of prisoners here today, Citizen. None of them are looking for a good home…
- This is where we keep prisoners…if you're looking to adopt, you're in the wrong place with cages.
- Welcome to the brig. No feeding, mocking, antagonizing, or empathizing with prisoners.
When you are the one in the Brig:
- Consider your actions, criminal. Rethink your lifestyle and be a non-recidivist!
- Nobody’s innocent, Citizen. There’s just different acceptable levels of guilt…
- You did the Crime, now pay the time! (Bad poetry is deemed an acceptable mode of punitive discipline…).
Notes
- All tasks are unavailable during confinement:
There's nothing you can do, cooped up in this tiny cell.
- The first three confinements are shorter than usual:
- need
- "Hey, haven't we seen you in here before?"
- "This is your last chance. After this, full sentences."
Background
There is a common understanding among all walks of conscious life: rules exist. Human-kind, through careful tailoring by social norms, have a set agreement about what those rules are and that agreement is put into a system of laws. The laws put boundaries on acceptable behavior. They protect and secure and sometimes oppress and restrict. But they exist and like everywhere else in the recognizable human experience, the breaking of those laws leads to detainment and incarceration. The universe of Tau Station is no different.
We are all that is left of humanity. Our laws matter.
Read on below about what we call “law and order” in our days, but what is a special experience in Tau Station. Try to avoid going to…the brig!
While traveling the many and vast stations, the best way to avoid detention and punishment is to observe the local Orwellian and Law Levels. A station’s Orwellian Level reflects how closely the station’s overseers watch the residents and visitors. Some stations have constant security feeds to observe every corner of the station: they watch, listen, compile, and study every move anyone makes at Orwellian Level 10. The scrutiny under which people function decreases as the level decreases. Likewise, at Law Level 10, the letter of the law is followed literally and closely with any infraction as cause for detainment. A simple, even accidental bump against a tourist in the docks can land an individual an assault charge. At Law level 10, leniency is not an option.
If the law is broken, the Brig awaits.
There are two main governing bodies to the cause of law and order in the Tau Station Universe. Consortium and the Gaule Protectorate. While the smaller movements of the Independents and the Free Booters exist, the station-to-station detention centers are owned by one of these two main governing presences. In Consortium space, stations employ station residents as the directors, wardens, and guards, while likewise Gaule brigs feature the same type of hierarchy with differing names: administrator, superintendent, inspector generals, security directors. The titles may change based on station location, but the fact remains: the station prisons are operated by the stations on which they’re located and the people who populate those stations. The culture of the station bleeds into the brig, sometimes literally.
The brigs are, at the best of times, the worst of places to find oneself.
Station-based management opens a host of concerns that the two primary governments often overlook. Both Consortium and Gaule fix their preference to calm and order. As long as a station’s brig appears to function on a minimal level, the governments are willing to allow that functioning to continue. It is, after all, a massive distance from one end of any given system to the other; the most efficient implementation of the prison system is to have the stations see to day-to-day management, even if those managers are woefully vicious in practice. It is not unheard of for inmates to attack one-another, in fact, in some cases it’s the preferred course of action: wardens and administrators sometimes allow inmate-on-inmate violence within their institutions as an efficient means to an end. Additionally, guards on many stations are known to abuse the population in the already inhumane brigs.
Money rules
Even on the most calm and peaceful stations, the brig is not the place one would want to take up residence. Luckily, these corrupt officials are not above an offered bribe or the services of a good lawyer. If you have the cred, you may yet have your freedom. This is a fact that festers as an irritant to the poorer of the universe. The oppression is known, feared, and hated. It grows an undercurrent of unrest that may yet still be a mystery to the those governing bodies that permit merely ‘functioning’ as acceptable.
The brig system, be they locally known as the prison, penitentiary, jail, or correctional centre is a place to avoid. A rose by any other name still features thorns sharp enough to wound and scar. And scar deeply, the brigs do. In Sol System’s most unethical and inhumane facility, inmates have been known to starve to death, bleed to death, and freeze to death. The infamy around the brigs is the stuff of horror and dread. This is presumably for good reason: the stations don’t want to contend with crime and often feel that the inhospitable brigs serve as either a deterrent or apt punishment. In most places, at the breaking of most laws, compassion takes a backseat to control.
"Intercepted. Correspondence from the Brig." text
“It is standard protocol to intercept correspondence sent to or coming from restricted areas. Citizen! Information is safety. ” Sometimes these intercepted documents yield tasty government secrets -sometimes they’re just a slice of someone’s life, like this one from distant LeGuin.
Intercepted CORETECHS transmission.
FLAG:
Inmate correspondence Ross154/LeGuin/Brig 7653 Star Stamp: 215.22/74:233 GCT
CLEARED for transmission.
Message Reads:Jodi,
The guard doesn’t like me. He wants to hurt me. He spells it out with his eyes. He has cruel eyes this one -the kind of eyes that want to do the cutting and the kicking themselves. Angry eyes. Envious eyes. They envy the elbow and the knuckles.
He’s different from the others. The others. Their eyes want what I sell. The others like what they see. The others I can bribe. Some, with as little as a smile. Others, want more -take more.
He’s back. Just stares at me through the viewport. I stare back, but only because the cameras are watching too.
If the cameras go off -he’ll go off.
He’s gone.
He’s gone and I’m in again.
Not the same one Jodi -same charge. I left Pompadour a cycle ago. The Gaule -they’re always looking down their noses at you. Yeah -you’re better than me, huh? That’s why you pay. You pay because you’re better, huh?
I hate them.
I hate them.
I fucking hate them.All these brigs look the same.
I’m on an indi. LeGuin. A dead end in the middle of nowhere.
This place lets me write to you at least. Let’s me stay connected. Everyone’s hooked on the Mesh out here. There’s nothing else to do. I hardly turn an eye on this station -it’s amazing I got busted. Meshheads -all of them. Can’t blame them. The place reeks of death.
I’m hungry.
I’m lonely.Shit. I think I’m scared.
He’s back again. Staring me down with those broken eyes.
If the cameras go off -he’ll go off.
Maybe when I get out we can coordinate a trajectory, huh?
Damn it’s cold in here.
I’m tired of this. I should hightail it to Tianjin and become a corporate girl. What I get thrown in the brig for here, they get tipped extra for there. Remember our talk -in the Mermaid? How’s your soul these days Jodi?
You don’t write anymore. Write to me, will you? It’s lights out. It’s dark and it’s cold. Write to me, will you Jodi? Let me know you’re okay.
Pitch black, but the cameras are still watching.
The cameras are still on.
If the cameras go off -he’ll go off.
Love,
C.
Additional information from the storyline
In the Jail at København could be speculated that it's where Carla is incarcerated (A Rude Awakening).
Also here is LeTestu, turned in by Drake for the murder of Doughty, but she was the one who killed him (X Marks Our Shot).
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